290 Benefits and Maintenance of Friendships
anxiety, and loneliness) as well as greater physical fitness. Oswald cites data showing
that the use of friendship maintenance behaviors promotes closeness in the early
stages of friendship development, correlates with one’s satisfaction with the friend-
ship, and predicts the longevity of friendships.
The Downside of Friendship
Juxtaposed to the view that relationships benefit us, especially the contributors to
Part III of this volume detail ways friendships can, as Hojjat and Moyer say, “sour.”
A lot of this has to do with the ways relationships themselves entail negative aspects.
Hojjat et al. assert,
Friendships are the breeding grounds for many of the events and experi-
ences that elicit offense, injury, and upset ... friendships constitute one
of the most common contexts in which people encounter transgressions,
provocations, betrayals, wrongdoings, and related aversive experiences
such as hurt feelings and hurtful messages.Hibbard and Walton discuss the view that competitively structured situations can,
at least under some circumstances, block us from satisfying our needs and thereby
undermine our liking potential friends and the quality of our relationships with
them. In particular, they proffer that when competition is focused on beating oth-
ers (as opposed to striving for personal excellence), competition is apt to have a
deleterious effect.
In another chapter in Part III, Clark, Harris, Fernandez, Hasan, and Votaw focus
considerable attention on identifying predictors of remaining friends after a breakup.
Their chapter begins, however, with another typically unpleasant aspect of relation-
ships: the hurts that occur both before and after the breakup of romantic relationships
that terminate. Ending friendships appears to be more benign than ending romantic
relationships, but nonetheless terminating friendships can create hurt feelings, too
(e.g., upset, angry, sad; Tortu, 1984). In this volume Adams et al. cite evidence that
discussions of fading friendships are dominated by feelings of “betrayal, indifference,
and hurt.” Similarly, the loss of friends through death can produce feelings of bereave-
ment (e.g., despair, depression, loss, aloneness; deVries & Johnson, 2002).
The negative side of friendship crops up elsewhere in the volume beyond Part
III. Erdley and Day indicate how friendships can contribute to youths’ socialization
into deviant behaviors (alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use; risky sexual behaviors;
delinquent offenses) and contagion effects can contribute to adolescents’ experienc-
ing depression. In the work context, Morrison and Cooper- Thomas note how dual
coworker and friendship relations can be problematic, and Lunsford notes three ways
having a peer as opposed to a more senior mentor may be limiting: (1) peers provide
less instrumental support, (2) they may be less willing to provide critical reflections,
and (3) the mentoring relationship may be perceived as providing the mentee with